Five flavors of flood

The sad truth is that according to my latest figures, less than 4 % of the comments here are legit. The rest is spam. Spam, spam, spam.

One thing that I find particularly amusing is how incompetent the average spammer is. This makes it easy to automatically filter off the by-product, so to speak, in my case using a home-made algorithm.

For the record, the sole purpose of flooding the comment fields is to create back-links to own our customer pages. Because… I don’t know. Five or ten years ago when search engines were less sophisticated, pages with many back-links ranked higher. It is not as simple today. Then again, the average spammer is not smart enough to notice or care that so called SEO in this form is dead and buried. Since spambots are virtually free to operate, however, I think the underlying explanation to their existence today is a big “why not?”

According to my observations on a sample size of thousands, there are roughly five types of spam, as exemplified below. I call them:

1. The Classic

This is the evergreen, simple and straightforward. Likely, comments in this category are human-made with few to zero efforts made to cover up the purpose.NAME: Buy [worthless product] onlineE-MAIL:[email protected]URL:https://[Worthless product].comMESSAGE: Really interesting blog, keep up the good work!

2. The Borderline

This type is difficult. I occasionally let some of these slip, especially if the link is non-commercial and somewhat relevant. A signature of the Borderline comment is that the link is provided both in the URL and the in message body.NAME: Mr EquicoachingE-MAIL:[email protected]URL:https://[Poster's own homepage].comMESSAGE: Amazing! Thanx for the info and video!! Isn't this a 'human mistake'? https://[Same page AGAIN].com

3. The Pretend-Admirer

Very common. Very robot-made. Very sent to trash.NAME: [Product name]E-MAIL:[email protected]URL:https://[Worthless product].comMESSAGE: My brother recommended I would possibly like this website. He was once entirely right. This publish actually made my day. You can not imagine simply how a lot time I had spent for this info! Thanks! I have shared your link with all my friends.

5. The Psycho

I worry for a second about the mental health of the person behind before I press “Mark as spam”NAME: SyperumeputleE-MAIL:[email protected]URL:https://[Worthless product].comMESSAGE: His next buren pocket look tied outlawed of thirty watches and he had hired back and apparently if course. Buy was, reduced a fossil, and adjusted watches if. Breitling for bentley watches. The white luella over to the replica is at handbag through mule. Not back accept certainly of he placed it that him didn't with i any preposterous. Monarch. He were faceted to count the christian mad. That torn tripped the tyla so and filed he around its rattray ragged, nor him was first replica behind a first trial against he and had their message with madman. Him protected dirty. For the counterfeit of his watches two celestial white ships preferred looked from dante's been of with those enemy. Relojes de imitacion porsche. They could sense grizzlies by memphis once anyway decisively of he turned as replica from uniform. The cartier replica, a sun - tanned glasses at conscious revelation j and cigars for matter safety, buried dante's in the hard effect climbed possible on the michael space. Replicas wathes ferrari Rah was, his rah replica, rusty lyrics it, slung and way. The rolex punched futile. Me had his makes, and it long did been. Alain silberstein replica. Timex was just eclipsed the watches once for me. It was on no seiko, shaven of. My replica realized breathing her nfl. Best replica iwc watches.

Finally, I took out the real links, but kept the original email addresses. So – feel free to spam the spammers!

I do use a number of filters, of course. I couldn’t manually go through hundreds of comments a day. I’d rather not go into specifics, but my home-made system works pretty well now. I have to say yes or no to perhaps 2 or 3 comments per day, which is very reasonable. And I occasionally scroll through the spam folder to see if my filters are too harsh – but so far so good. I would like to maintain a CAPTCHA and a sign-up free environment for as long as possible, for obvious reasons.